Corporations Bold with Balderdash

Corporations Bold with Balderdash

AUSTIN -- A new wrinkle in the annals of corporate scandal: Salomon Smith Barney, the stock brokerage/investment banking firm, allocated almost a million shares of hot IPO (initial public offerings) shares in 21 different companies to Bernard Ebbers, CEO of WorldCom, and that is just the tip of the Everest, according to reports in The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere. Salomon also gave IPO shares to about two dozen other top telecom executives.

According to The Journal, "The linking of investment banking business to IPO allocations has been a controversial, yet pervasive, practice on Wall Street."

The New York Times, not one to leap to a conclusion, reported, "At issue is whether Salomon handed out such allocations to ensure that companies like WorldCom continued to give the firm investment banking business."

Surely not! No connection whatever. Motivated only by charity, these brokers.

Come on, get real. If this were a Third World country with CEOs getting IPOs in exchange for investment banking business, no one would have any trouble identifying it as a kickback.

Meanwhile, I'm still working on President Bush's challenge at the economic forum in Waco, Texas.

"Apart from government," he inquired, his brow furrowed with earnestness, "what can we do?"

How about we get the CEOs of the Fortune 500 together for a big prayer breakfast? They can discuss faith-based securities regulation, faith-based toxic waste disposal and other innovative "apart from government" approaches.

As the United States distinguishes itself by being all-but-absent from the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg -- we sent a "low-level" delegation -- of course we are reminded of the words of our peerless leader on the subject of global warming: "We'll get used to it," said Mr. Bush.

One interesting aspect of the debate on global warming is that there is a "debate." Earth scientists -- even those at Texas A&M -- have no doubt that it is happening, and happening faster than their original models predicted.

But as so often happens, public debate is deformed by corporate money. In the current issue of Mother Jones is a report on a corporate lobby called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which specializes in ghostwriting "model" McBills for state legislatures, bills that unsurprisingly favor the same corporate special interests that fund the lobby.

Texas Rep. Fred Bosse went to an ALEC conference and told MJ, "I saw that one of the talks was on the greenhouse effect, which was one of the issues I've always been interested in. There was this professor from someplace, and the theme of his talk was that the greenhouse effect is nothing but a scam being advanced by environmental terrorists to destroy business in America."

As Upton Sinclair observed, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." But the people we elect to represent the public interest theoretically suffer from no such conflict -- except for those campaign contributions. When the scientists are telling you one thing, and Exxon is telling you another, who you gonna believe? Who's got a dog in the fight?

American corporations aren't stupid: They know from public relations. I am indebted to Mother Jones for the following list of recent corporate name changes: Nuclear Engineering is now U.S. Ecology; Monsanto Specialty Chemicals is now Solutia; ChemLawn/ChemGreen is now Tru Green/LandCare; the Agricultural Insecticide and Fungicide Association is now Crop Life America; and Benton Oil and Gas Co. has become Harvest Natural Resources. Think they're on to something?

What concerns me about anyone pretending to expertise describing global warming as "a scam advanced by environmental terrorists to destroy business" is that it sends public debate into cloud cuckoo-land.

It's not as though the measurements and readings taken by several thousand earth scientists around the world and by the United States government are under question. One can certainly debate what the findings mean in terms of global warming -- how much, how fast -- and scientists do have differences on those points.

But I notice an increase in the tendency on the right to think one can win an argument by dismissing or impugning the other side.

Molly Ivins (August 30, 1944 – January 31, 2007) was an American newspaper columnist, liberal political commentator, humorist and author. From Americans Who Tell the Truth: "To honor a journalist as a truth teller is implicitly to comment on the scarcity of courage and candor in a profession ostensibly dedicated to writing and speaking the truth. Molly Ivins is singular in her profession not only for her willingness to speak truth to power but for her use of humor to lampoon the self-seeking, the corrupt and the incompetent in positions of public trust. Her wit and insight place her squarely in the tradition of America’s great political humorists like Mark Twain."

Further

Academics are increasingly, ingeniously fighting back against an Orwellian "Professor Watchlist" aimed at exposing "radical" teachers. The list has inspired online trolls to name their own suspects - Albus Dumbledore, Dr. Pepper, Mr. Spock - and a Watchlist Redux to honor not trash targets from Jesus to teachers daring to "think critically about power." Now 100 Notre Dame professors have asked to join the list in solidarity, proclaiming, "We wish to be counted among those you are watching."